Purple leaves on Elan Strawberry Plant.
Miss Becks
Posts: 3,468
in Fruit & veg
Hi guys,
Just wanted to ask if my plant is trying to tell me something. Her older first leaves have started to turn purple in colour. Does this mean she is lacking something?
She has nice new growth all the time, and is flowering and started fruiting, but just wodered about the coloured leaves. She's in a flower bucket with MP compost. I've fed her once with liquid tomato feed.
Any advice would be welcome. This is my favourite plant. I want to help her along. 
Here are some pics of the leaves....
Thanks for any help.
Becks. xx
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Strawberry plants are pretty sturdy, I might be wrong but I wouldn't worry to much about it, looks like new growth is coming through and these are old leaves dying off. You can pick off the purply leaves if there are new shoots and there's healthy growth coming through....or just let the leaves die naturally.
Looks like you have some nice strawberries growing.
Thankyou Zoomer. Her crown seems to have actually split into 2, and shoots just keep coming! Non seem to be runners yet though.
It doesn't seem to be causing any trouble, but wondered if the purple meant I needed to be feeding her something. But you and Geoff said it's ok, so I'm happy with that. Thanks.
The plant should evetually produce a runner, if it does, let the runner grow and you should get 4 to 5 new plants for next year
That's what I'm hoping for. It's the first strawberry plant I've ever had, and when I first bought it earlier this year, it did produce one runner, and I cut it off because I didn't know what it was and it made it look untidy!! LOL Hoping it sends out more.
Not really good practice to take too many runners from one plant and only root at the first joint, cutting the runner off beyond that. It is also best to cut off and remove any old leaves after fruiting, retaining the new leaves.
Now, I have just Googled this strawberry and the info says remove the flowers/fruit in the first year and that the plant is biennial. Does that mean it may not have runners, and you have to either grow it from seed or keep buying in new palnts?
I've googled it many times Welshonion, and on some sites it says it does have runners, and others it says it doesn't, but as I posted above, it did send one out when I first bought it which I cut off, so I'm hoping it will send more.